Good luck with that. Unless you are running a Commodore 64 it is unlikely that a single person can understand, inspect and make decisions on modern operating systems or even individual applications.
There was a small window in which you had the option to use your computer as a 'digital typewriter' and 'sometimes send a fax', but expected and supplied functionality this day and age relies on many small components being heavily interconnected, much in the same way that social circles are interconnected, social networks (the digital variant) are based on critical mass (not technical prowess, legal status or privacy) and the amount of people that have narrow/well-defined use cases for their computers are at an all-time low making them less and less significant to cater to.
If you had a Apple computer with 10.3 or newer, this was the norm. If you had macOS 9 with iTools, it was the norm as well (for a bit until it got dropped in favour of MobileMe).
The old times weren't better, just different (and much less feature-rich). Great for a few power users, bad for everyone else.
This is defeatist, and ignores the second-order advantages of Free and Open Source software. You don't need a Commodore 64, you need a decent GNU/Linux distro.
In practice, it's far less common for FOSS to contain code that works against the user's interests, as the vendor/developer has no veil of ambiguity and no deniability. Only one person needs to find the troublesome code, and they can make the rest of us aware. Everyone knows this, so FOSS malware is rarely released in the first place.
FOSS isn't a silver bullet (see Firefox's telemetry) but it's not the case that there's nothing you can do but use user-hostile proprietary software for everything.
That's both a gross misrepresentation of what I wrote, and completely wrong too. It doesn't matter how open your software sources are if you run it on closed hardware. And unless you go back to ancient hardware, it will be closed enough that you do not get what you think you are getting.
At the same time, it's also just realistic: if you buy something that is made to cater to a market segment that expects a lot of complex systems to appear to work together in a seamless way, supporting many features requiring many thousands of top-tier engineers to build and maintain for many years, then you, a solo user, are not likely to be able to contain the same amount of knowledge and time to see every detail and component of such a system. So no, the product, the context and biology will not allow you to contain such a system in a single mind.
Same goes for what you call user-hostile. If you ask a user which OS is more user-hostile out of a list that contains any Linux-distribution, but also Windows and macOS, it doesn't matter what is technically measures, what matters is that the user will call out that Linux distribution for being user-hostile. Again, it's not about wat is technically possible, what has been done, or what some individual does for themselves, it's about the giant user base that the commercial giants are targeting with their products.
As for telemetry: just because alarmists alarm about it all day long doesn't mean it's universally bad. What is bad is going it for user profiling and not telling about it, but if I need to know how my software is performing, I know ahead of time that asking my user base is a waste of time. Either I'll need automated reporting of things like crashes, performance measurements and spindumps, or I can't do much to make the software better. There are too many configurations and situations out there to realistically cover using some imagination and testing. Even on Debian, popcon is super useful, and people who complain about their stuff not making it on disk 1 are usually also the ones not submitting. You get what you pay for, and if you don't supply how you use the product, chances are you're not going to get an improvement you like. That is a choice to make, but removing it completely "because telemetry bad" is kinda dumb.
It matters a great deal. This thread is about the behaviour of Finder, a proprietary software application.
More broadly, while it's true that most modern hardware prevents the user from having full control, it's also the case that much is won by using only Free and Open Source software.
(Last year the FSF got their servers onto fully Free Software BIOS software, but this took considerable effort as well as the use of hardware from 2012. [0])
> So no, the product, the context and biology will not allow you to contain such a system in a single mind.
Agreed, but while a total understanding of the system is one way to achieve confidence that it isn't built to work against your interests, it isn't the only way.
> If you ask a user which OS is more user-hostile out of a list that contains any Linux-distribution, but also Windows and macOS, it doesn't matter what is technically measures, what matters is that the user will call out that Linux distribution for being user-hostile.
Again this is defeatism. Free Software desktop operating systems have some usability issues, but in my experience they're much more approachable than many people seem to think. This is especially true now that a web browser is enough to enable most of what desktop computers are used for. It's not as if the non-Free operating systems are perfect either.
FOSS operating systems aren't in such a good place on mobile as they are on desktop and server, unfortunately.
> As for telemetry: just because alarmists alarm about it all day long doesn't mean it's universally bad. What is bad is going it for user profiling and not telling about it
Yes, I don't think anyone disagrees. HackerNews folks give Firefox a hard time over its telemetry precisely because the user isn't given a choice. They aren't even told it's going to happen, as I recall. It's particularly grating considering Mozilla's self-promotion as being uniquely pro-user.
> You get what you pay for
In terms of spying on their users, Debian is far better behaved than Microsoft, despite that Debian's offering is available free of charge and Microsoft's is not.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/closing-in-on-fully-free-...
A couple years ago I was able to intercept every connection on an Android with a mirrored switch port and Wireshark+ a root certificate. We shouldn’t be discouraging people from controlling their own machines. Certificate pinning might be trickier, I haven’t played with it yet.
It might make much more sense to just get the thing you wanted in the first place, right?
Agreed, we have to pick our battles. Personally I pick this one. We should exercise as much control as technically possible over these devices that are intimately linked to every aspect of our lives.
They are collecting data on how their software in used. Also this article is talking about a visual search feature that uses Apple's servers to search for things in your images. Apple is just as much entitiled to do this as a multiplayer game connecting to game servers. You choose to use the software and you choose to permit it onto your network.
>e.g., scary browser warnings, SSL errors, connection failures, etc., from placing any trust in themselves
These tech companies are trying to improve the security of their ecosystem. TLS is paramount in them modern world to protect people from MitM attacks.
The first reason is that Apple does not ask purchasers for permission to do this surveillance. It just makes it a default.
The second reason is that if purchasers applied the same standard to Apple, it is unilkely Apple would agree to such surveillance of its own computers.
Imagine hypotethically that purchasers shared data with Apple but every time Apple used the data, Apple computers would automatically make outbound connections from Apple's computers, over Apple's internal local network, through Apple's firwalls, over the internet, to purchasers computers so the purchasers would "understand how Apple was using their data".
Imagine further that Apple had no control over these connections, and that Apple was not allowed to "MiTM" the outbound connections made from Apple's computers to purchasers' computers to see what data/information was being sent.
What if purchasers argued they were "only trying to protect the security of their ecosystem", e.g., the collection of entities with whom they share data. What if purchasers argued they were only trying to protect against MiTM attacks where a third party might learn about Apple's activities, namely how Apple uses the data Apple gathers from Apple computer purchasers.
The point is that Apple might have concerns about others, including its hardware customers, knowing when and how it is using its own computers. Similarly, purchasers might have concerns about others, including Apple, knowing when and how how they are using their computers.
This begs the question why is it not possible. I monitor the traffic on the computers I own which means I have sometimes to decrypt traffic from applications and then re-encryot before sending from the loopback to the local network I own and then over the wire onto "the internet". I like to know what data applications are sending or trying to send. I like to have control over it. That's not unreasonable in the slightest.
Yet, in the "tech" company model of computer network use, the computer owner is discouraged, e.g., scary browser warnings, SSL errors, connection failures, etc., from placing any trust in themselves. Instead it advocates, if not effectvely mandates, placing trust (and fees, i.e., for "domain names") in some other entity, e.g., Apple, other "Certificate Authorities", etc. The mere act of questioning this model is often attacked by "tech" workers commenting online. Watch it happen in the replies.
Under this model, it is as if the the computer and local network owner does not also own the traffic. Who owns the computer. Who owns the local network. Who own the data. Who should be allowed to view it and control it. If anything, one would think the computer and network owner should be allowed to prevent any third party, including Apple, if they so choose, from initiating remote connections and sending data from the computer owner's computer.
Even after purchase Apple believes it is entitled to collect data from someone else's computer, over someone else's network. And it also believes no computer purchaser ever has an interest in seeing what data is being collected, by monitoring the traffic, let alone an interest in preventing these connections. There is no option provided to globally disable all phoning home to Apple, to indicate "No, thank you."
It was not always like this, folks. I owned older Apple computers that never made such assumptions. The computer belonged to the purchaser. Generally, firewalls were not used to block software pre-installed on the computer by Apple. The so-called "tech industry" has moved the needle and tried to normalise what is IMHO an entirely different scenario.